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Monthly Archives: February 2012

I’ve just fin­ished updat­ing my qua­dratic dis­crim­i­nants applet. It is larger, more infor­ma­tive, and is in the two usual for­mats, dark on light back­ground or light on dark back­ground. It draws the graph of the func­tion on coor­di­nate axes, gives solu­tions, in surds (rad­i­cals) if nec­es­sary, of the equations.

It also uses my recently-developed drag-boxes to change the val­ues of the para­me­ters. These are sim­ply a box on screen with a num­ber inside: if you click the num­ber it increases as you drag right or decreases as you drag left. I hope that once you’re used to it works much more quickly than the old but­tons. I’m quite proud of these boxes!

The applet can also be used to demon­strate the com­plex con­ju­gate roots that equa­tions have when the dis­crim­i­nant is neg­a­tive. This is use­ful for more advanced stu­dents, study­ing (UK) Fur­ther Math­e­mat­ics (FP1) or (US) 10th grade+ (Num­ber) Mathematics.

Enjoy play­ing around with this new ver­sion, and let me know what you think.

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I’ve extended my Fac­tors applet to include num­bers up to 9000. This is an exten­sion into 4-digit num­bers, and the list now con­tains the first four per­fect num­bers. Num­ber of fac­tors applet I’ve also included a prime fac­tor­iza­tion for each … Con­tinue read­ing →